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Any novelist hailed as "an heir apparent to Michael Ondaatje" by author Paul Yoon and lauded as writing "a luminous debut" by Oprah's magazine is probably doomed. Nothing can reach a bar set so high by the archangel of book/wine clubs. Vogue seals the deal: She's "2014's most buzzed-about debut author…with enormous lake-blue eyes that don't miss a thing."
Given that sentencing, Katy Simpson Smith's debut novel impressively holds its own. But it's far from faultless. An unendingly dismal tale of three generations of fathers and daughters in Beaufort, N.C., after the American Revolution, The Story of Land and Sea (Harper, 256 pages, $26.99) begins with Tabitha's 10th birthday and works backward until it reaches her grandfather Asa, a turpentine plantation owner and Anglican zealot bent on spawning his patriarchal legacy.
"What if God didn't put us here to accept, but to struggle?" is the novel's recurring query.
When the friendless, motherless ingénue Tab spouts black bile and blood from yellow fever, her reformed pirate father, John, packs her on a rum-runner. "I've saved half the men I haven't killed," brags her doctor. Traveling backward, we reach the time when John takes Tab's mother, Helen, out to sea, stealing the Southern belle from her father, Asa, and bringing her back "with the seed of a child in her belly."
Of the novel's many pairings—Asa and John; Tab and her missing mother; the eponymous land and sea—the most interesting is Helen and her plantation slave Mall, whose onionlike layers of determination, motherly instinct, deference and defiance squash the stereotype of the Southern slave.
But Mall stands out too late to save The Story. In a novel riddled with death, the characters are often lifeless from the outset. The author is a historian first, building settings with meticulously researched details—a parlor of inherited couches, swindled rugs, and "paintings with flat faces." Aside from Mall, Smith's human subjects go equally flat.
Meanwhile, Smith's prose often ends up sounding like a dewy-eyed Jonathan Edwards channeling The Sound and the Fury. "Regret only exists once the opportunity for change is gone," she writes. Smith's South is a dark world where "death only comes to mothers" and the widowers divide their time between mourning their daughters and wives, and pondering the God who would run such an operation. Drowning in book-club melodrama and poetic aspirations, The Story of Land and Sea is a painless undertaking, but also unrewarding.
GO: Katy Simpson Smith joins author Pauls Toutonghi in conversation at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, on Tuesday, Aug. 11. 7:30 pm. Free.
WWeek 2015